On your path to becoming a successful entrepreneur, you will make a lot of mistakes. In fact, even after you become a successful entrepreneur, you will continue to make a lot of mistakes. Importantly, the difference between success and failure is often how you handle these missteps.
A recent article "How to Deal With Angry Customers" discusses how top restaurant owners deal with dissatisfied customers and provides some good lessons on what you should do when you screw up.
These lessons include:
1. Pamper Them: when a customer seems evenly remotely upset, go way out of your way to ensure their happiness. Just knowing that you really care about them and are looking out for them will go a long way to ensuring their satisfaction.
2. Make No Excuses: When was the last time you voiced a concern as a customer, got a reply that it was somebody else's fault (e.g., the waiter saying that the chef must have screwed up and overcooked the food), and were satisfied? Never. Making excuses and/or passing the buck never works.
In fact, I love this quote by the executive chef at a New York's Maialino restaurant, "Excuses will only elevate the customer's sense of your restaurant's incompetency."
Importantly, most often the person at your organization receiving the complaint will not be the person who made the mistake. So make sure you build an organization with a culture that avoids passing the buck; a culture where everyone is empowered to make decisions to satisfy customers, and not make excuses.
3. Comp Judiciously: Simply put, if a customer is not happy, refund their money. I have taken this one to heart and as you may know, every single one of Growthink's products comes with a 100% money back guarantee.
Now, this is actually a little extreme, and most businesses can't "comp" or refund customers so openly and still maintain profitability. But you must consider refunding your customers in order to maintain their satisfaction. In making this judgment, consider the customer's potential lifetime value and their potential ability to spread good or bad word of mouth (it's hard to tell these days who has this power, as any particular customer may have a Twitter or Facebook account with a huge following). Finally, consider how badly you screwed up (and if you screwed up really badly, you should give the refund).
4. Focus on the Solution, Not the Problem: Customers don't want to hear a lengthy discussion of the problem; they just want it solved. So in the short-term, focus exclusively on providing a solution to the upset customer. Later, after the immediate situation is resolved, figure out how the problem possibly could have been avoided in the first place.
5. The Customer Is Not Always Right: An important point is that the customer is not always right. Oftentimes this type of problem can be avoided by setting expectations before the product is delivered. For example, if the waiter said that the steak was prepared with a pink center while the customer was ordering, the customer wouldn't be upset when they received it (versus if they were expecting it to be cooked more and then saw that the center was pink).
Even if the customer is wrong, your organization must determine the best way to handle the situation in order to lessen the impact.
Finally, I've been shopping quite a bit on Amazon.com lately. And I generally look at the customer reviews. Consider the book "Think and Grow Rich" which is a classic great book. On Amazon.com, it has 489 customer reviews with an average rating of 4.5 which is pretty much unheard of. While 75% of buyers gave it a full 5 stars, 36 buyers (7%) gave it just 1 star.
The point is that you are never going to satisfy all of your customers all of the time. So make sure you have a culture and systems to deal with dissatisfied customers. Since this can greatly impact your success!
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